The case is mostly a symbolic win, but an important one. It should serve as a clear signal to other copyright holders that false DMCA takedown requests are not always left unpunished.

DMCA takedown notices are an enormous amount of work for any company offering a service that allows the publishing of user generated content. At Viddler, when the platform was free and public, we’d routinely get takedown notices. A large percentage of them were legitimate and were relatively easy to act upon. However, the edge cases and the cases that were clearly an abuse of the DMCA and an attack on things like free speech, parody, and other things were so much harder to deal with. It can be incredibly taxing on small businesses.

A huge amount of kudos goes to Automattic for fighting this one. As Ernesto wrote… it is a win that will hopefully send a message that Automattic is willing to go to court for their user’s rights. And that is a very important line to draw that should help to begin bringing the number of takedown notices that Automattic receives down a bit.